I leave you the best phrases of Plato (427-347 BC) about life, education, time, love, knowledge, politics, the myth of the cave and much more. Plato is one of the most influential philosophers in history, for his studies on justice, beauty, equality, aesthetics, theology, cosmology or epistemology. He was a disciple of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle.
You may also be interested in these phrases of philosophy, these from Aristotle or these from Socrates.
-Ignorance is the root and trunk of all evil.
-Never discourage someone who progresses, no matter how slow they go.
-You can discover more about a person in an hour of play, than in a year of conversation.
-The greatest wealth is living content with little.
-Beauty resides in the eyes of the beholder.
-The first and best victory is to conquer yourself.
-The measure of a man is what he does with his power.
-Ideas are the origin of all things.
-What I really know is the extent of my ignorance.
- Courage is knowing what not to be afraid of.
-A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is among a thousand, but a realized one could not be found even among a hundred thousand men.
-Knowledge is the food of the soul.
-The principle is the most important part of the job.
-Each heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers to it. Those who want to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
-True friendship can only exist between equals.
-A house that has a library has a soul.
-Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
-The wise speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
-Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, charm and joy to life and everything.
-A dog has the soul of a philosopher.
-Need is the mother of invention.
-The price that good men pay for indifference to public affairs is that of being ruled by bad men.
-No wealth can make a bad man at peace with himself.
-Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that requires practice. We do not act with reason because we are excellent, in fact, we achieve excellence by acting with reason.
-We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. (Phrase learned from her teacher and tutor, Socrates).
-The objective of education is to teach us to love the beautiful.
-Be good, because everyone you know is fighting a difficult battle.
-False words are not only bad in themselves, but infect the soul with evil.
-The maximum penalty for refusing to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
-Love is a serious desire of the mind.
-I am the wisest man alive, because I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. (Phrase learned from his teacher and tutor, Socrates).
-Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way to bypass the laws.
-Come, then, and spend a free hour in the narration, and our history will be the education of our heroes.
-I have hardly met a mathematician who is capable of reasoning.
-Anything that leads to error, it can be said that it enchants.
-Either we find what we are looking for, or at least we free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.
-There is truth in wine and in children.
-It was a wise man who invented God.
-I'm trying to think, don't confuse me with facts.
-If women are expected to do some work like men, we must teach them the same things.
-No human being is of serious importance.
-The physical exercise, when it is compulsory, does not do any harm to the body; but the knowledge that is acquired by obligation, does not find any sustenance in the mind.
-Character is simply a habit continued over time.
-Good actions give us strength to ourselves and inspire the good actions of others.
-How could they see anything other than shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? (Excerpt from "The Myth of the Caverns").
-Those who tell the story, govern society.
-The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
-Human behavior is derived from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge.
-The soul takes flight to a world that is invisible, but when it reaches it it is sure of happiness and dwells forever in paradise.
-You are my star, and my astronomer too; and I wish that I was heaven, with a billion eyes to look at you!
-Education is teaching our children to wish the right things.
-There are three kinds of men: lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor and lovers of profit.
-There is in each of us, even those who seem to be the most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild and lawless.
-Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, much less believed by the masses.
-When men speak ill of you, live in such a way that no one can believe them.
-There are two things that a person should never be angry with: what can help him, and what not.
-Philosophy is the highest music.
-The books are immortal children who defy their parents.
-People are like dirt. They can either nurture you and help you grow as a person, or they can stunt your growth and cause you to wither and die.
-Of all the animals, the child is the most difficult to handle.
-How can it be proved if at this moment we are not sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or if we are awake and talking to each other in a waking state?
-You should not honor man more than the truth.
-Love is born in every human being; call back the halves of our original nature to unite; try to do one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.
-Musical innovation is fraught with dangers for the State, since when the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
-An empty bowl makes a louder sound, so those who have the least wit are the greatest charlatans.
-Time is the living image of reality.
-Love is simply the name for desire and the search for totality.
-Writing is the geometry of the soul.
-Poetry is closer to the fundamental truth than history.
-I would like to teach children music, physics and philosophy; but more importantly, music, for the patterns of music and all the arts, are the keys to learning.
-Asking yourself shows that you are a philosopher, since the question is the only principle of philosophy.
-Any man can easily do harm, but not all men can do good to others.
-Poets say great and wise things that they themselves do not understand.
-Man is a being in search of meaning.
-Everything is flow, nothing stays still.
-The direction in which a man's education begins will determine his future life.
-Lack of activity destroys the condition of any human being.
-He who loves, does not take paths in the dark.
-Is there the perfect word?
-The beauty of style, harmony, grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.
-The man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and flee… A man must wait and not take his own life, until God summons him.
-Knowledge becomes bad if the goal is not virtuous.
-Boldness is knowing what not to fear.
-Aging has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax, then as Socrates says: we are free from understanding and not only from a mad teacher, but from many.
-The reason why in youth men often appear simple and are simply manipulated by the dishonest is because they have no examples of what evil means in their own souls.
-Too much debauchery seems to turn into nothing more than a lot of slavery.
-They get richer the more they think about making wealth and the less they think about doing virtue.
-If our citizens are well educated and become wise men, they will easily see the route through all this.
-Those who pretend to be great should not love themselves or their own things. They must love what is fair, whether they do it themselves, or others.
-Two times and three more times as suggested, it is appropriate to review and repeat what is right.
-Justice means taking ownership of your own affairs and not meddling with the concerns of other men.
-The arguments derived from probabilities are inactive.
-A good adversary is better than a bad friend.
-You must not assume that it is true that stones are sacred and pieces of wood, birds, snakes and human beings are not. Of all those things, the most sacred is a good human being and the most polluted is an evil one.
-The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to bear the vision of the divine.
-Humiliation is the first step towards knowledge, even when we refer to the most common things.
-The man never legislates, but the destinies and accidents that happen in all kinds of ways, legislate in all kinds of ways.
-The love of the noblest, although people are less beautiful than others, is especially honorable.
-Injustice is usually censured by the blind who are afraid of suffering and not precisely because of the fear they have of committing injustice.
-The definition of the good is reduced by successive questions and virtue is consolidated by being identical to the knowledge that is generated.
-Those who govern the state should be the only people to have the privilege of lying. Whether at home or abroad, they can be left to lie for the good of the state.
-The God of love lives from a need, like hunger and thirst, it is almost impossible to eradicate.
-The actions are modified according to the form of their performance.
-Naive loves are considered more honorable than hidden ones.
-There is simple ignorance, which is the source of the slightest offenses and there is also double ignorance, which is accompanied by a presumption of wisdom. Whoever is under the influence of the latter, imagines that he knows everything when in reality he knows nothing.
-The essence of what is not beautiful must be separated and opposed to a certain type of existence that is called beautiful.
-In many opportunities, the right question is usually more important than the correct answer.
-Love is especially concerned with the good and is perfected with the company of reserve and justice, whether between gods or men.
-Love is the source of all our happiness and harmony.
-Justice is nothing other than the convenience of the strongest.
-Even the gods love jokes.
-All learning is found in the disciple, not in the teacher.
-The greatest incentive for evil is pleasure.
-Integrity is the light that guides your path.
-Educators should reflect on the simplest and most effective methods to change the way of thinking.
-You have not discovered a recipe for memory, but as a reminder.
-When you have to pay an income tax, the honest man will pay more and the unjust one less in the same amount of income.
-The common people are attached to life, because the only thing they take care of is the body and the pleasures of the senses, forgetting that they have a soul, and thus death terrifies them, because when the body is destroyed, it is deprived of what you want most.
-The consequence of everything is that the soul exists before our appearance in this world and so do the essences.
-Above all the things that hurt our senses in this world, there are purely intelligible beings, who are the perfect, absolute, eternal, immutable types of everything imperfect exists in this world.
-Knowing is nothing more than remembering, and memory supposes previous knowledge; therefore, if the soul remembers things that it has not been able to know in this life, it is proof that it has existed before.
-Let's retrace our steps to return to the foundation of reason.
-It is necessary to expel the demons of lies.
-The man who does everything that leads to happiness depends on himself, and not on other men; You have adopted the best plan to live happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of virile character and wisdom.
-The soul does not carry anything with it to the other world, other than its education and its culture. At the beginning of the journey to the other world, education and culture can provide the greatest help, or on the contrary, they can act as the greatest burden on the person who has just died.
-In practice, people who study philosophy for too long, become very strange creatures, not to say totally vicious; while even those who are the best are reduced to complete uselessness as members of society.
-The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done much wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of apprehension; but the man who is aware that he has not done any wrongdoing, is full of joy and lives the comfort of old age.
-In politics we assume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to manage a city or a state. When we are ill, we do not ask for the most handsome or eloquent doctor.
-Don't train children to learn by force or hard; rather guide them toward learning by what amuses their minds, so that they may be able to discover exactly the peculiar inclination of each one's genius.